


This Is All

by HazelHolly



Category: Veronica Mars (TV)
Genre: Angst, Bad BDSM Etiquette, Canon Divergence, Consensual Sex, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Non-Monogamous Sex, Not A Happy Ending, Porn With Plot, Post-Season/Series 03, Sex but not sexy sex, Time Skips, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:07:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 19,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24059452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HazelHolly/pseuds/HazelHolly
Summary: “I don’t know why you…”let them do this to you? Do this to yourself?“…think this is okay.” He won’t meet her eyes. His voice drops. “It hurts to look at you, in the days after…it hurts to see what it does to you.”“Then don’t look. Doesn’t seem to be that difficult for you.” She presses her fingers into the delicate curve of her wrist, where another bruise nestles against her pulse. She likes that one.
Relationships: Don Lamb/Veronica Mars, Leo D'Amato/Veronica Mars, Logan Echolls/Veronica Mars, Wallace Fennel & Veronica Mars
Comments: 29
Kudos: 13





	1. 0.0

**Author's Note:**

> So...Hello! This is the first fic I've ever posted. Let me know if there are other tags you'd recommend, especially as we progress. I don't own Veronica Mars (sadly). Please be kind and gentle, both to me and others! I hope you enjoy.

She shifts absently and leans into the ache that spreads across her hip when she does. If she looked down, she knows she’d see just the purple crest of a bruise arching above the waistline of her jeans.

“I don’t know why you…” _let them do this to you? Do this to yourself?_ “…think this is okay.” He won’t meet her eyes. His voice drops. “It hurts to look at you, in the days after…it hurts to see what it does to you.”

“Then don’t look. Doesn’t seem to be that difficult for you.” She presses her fingers into the delicate curve of her wrist, where another bruise nestles against her pulse. She likes that one.

He finally looks at her. She stared at herself for several long minutes this morning, so she knows what he sees. Half-moons of indigo below her eyes, a barely concealed hickey tucked beneath her left ear, shorn hair that just barely tickles the slice of her jaw. He shakes his head and angles his gaze back at the table.

“Nah, I guess not.” The tired resignation in his tone belies the casual words. Around them other patrons juggle petite, ceramic cups steaming with espresso and conversations about the latest 09er gossip and who got who pregnant. She sighs.

“Look as much as it…as bad as it is, as painful as it can be, as unpleasant or whatever other synonyms you might want to use to describe it, at least it’s…mine.” She plants her gaze on the bright, open face of an infant across the shop, draped over their mother’s shoulder. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches his face contort in the way it does when he’s trying to suppress his expressions. If she faced him and looked closer, she knows she’d find in his eyes what she has all the times before: pain, pity, and, as much as he tries to hide it, disgust. She imagines her voice like a shard of metal pulled from a forge and plunged into cold water, hardening it, tempering it. “For as long as I live, _I_ am the only one who gets to choose who’s inside me.”

He blushes, and she can’t help but grin at how reminiscent it is of the young high school boy he used to be, so easily embarrassed by sex and any accompanying connotations.

“I get it.”

She frees the infant from her gaze and narrows her eyes.

“Okay, I mean, obviously, I don’t _actually_ get it, but I can understand. I just wish you’d let it be someone…good.” He immediately raises his hands in the universal surrender sign. “Not that I get a say, of course! That’s not what I meant. I just…I hate seeing you hurt, even if you’re the one doing the hurting. It’s like you’re wielding them as weapons against yourself - and they’re consenting to it, I’m not saying they’re not - I just hope someday you can let someone… _in_ …who doesn’t have to be a weapon.”

She nods. “I know.” A sudden desperation surges in her chest and she leans forward to grip one of his hands resting on the table. “I appreciate you, Wallace. I want you to know that.”

“Who wouldn’t? I _am_ supa-fly.” She chuckles and he ducks his head with a laugh before his features sober. “I know, V, I know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All my love for my beta, [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric). Check out her work!


	2. 1.0

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for chapter warnings.

He snaps the elastic of her black underwear, and she doesn’t let herself flinch at the sting against her tailbone. 

“I had always thought you’d wear white panties.” He chuckles. “Then again, that’s too virginal for you, isn’t it?” 

“I thought you came here to fuck me?” She bites back. “I didn’t pay good money for this motel room just to lay here and listen to you talk shit.” 

He hooks his fingers under the waistband and slides her underwear down, letting it pool at her ankles. She widens her stance and recirculated air drifts against the backs of her thighs. His jeans rustle, belt buckle rasping against leather. She hears him kick them off. He plants his feet to flank hers, and for a moment it’s the only place they touch. Large hands palm at her hips, and his calluses scrape against her skin. She lets herself smile, briefly. They’re one of the main reasons she likes him for this. 

She inhales deeply and pushes her forehead into her clasped hands, her elbows and forearms bracketing her head and braced on the thin motel comforter. He’s breathing softly. He’s hesitating. She lifts onto her tip toes, arching her back, presenting. A pressure and she exhales, imagines the release of air opening space for him, and he eases inside. He groans. 

He’s not the biggest she’s had, but her walls mold to him, and she bears down when he’s halfway in. He grunts, and one of the hands leaves her hips. It snakes through the small space between her body and the mattress to grope at her breast. The angle changes, becomes sharper and deeper as he reaches to grip her. He doesn’t paw at her breast like some men do, but his fingers lack the finesse of a man who’s experienced in the ways of pleasing women. He tugs, and she gasps but doesn’t let herself moan. 

She scrapes her toes against the stubby carpet, wishing there was more to sink her feet into and give her leverage. When he rocks forward, she almost loses her balance. 

His other hand leaves her hip to brace against the mattress. The pressure of him inside jostles something loose in her chest the way it always does, the way it only does when she’s here, regardless of who with. She sighs in relief. He leans further over her, forcing her to arch more to keep him inside, and breathes out short puffs between her shoulder blades. His hand twists her breast when she tightens again.

“Fuck, Mars.”

“I think…that’s already…what…I’m doing,” she forces out between thrusts. She keeps her eyes open, but she’s so close to the comforter that she can’t make out the pattern. It’s all just blurs of color. She wishes she’d remembered to turn on the television beforehand, like she normally does, to block out the slap of his flesh against hers.

His fingers release her breast and drift down her body. He presses at her in unrefined movements. The motions ease the burning in her chest even as they stoke the heat in her stomach and she tenses. She needs the burn, the ache.

“No, none of that.”

He huffs but removes his hand. “You’re a piece of work, Mars, you know that?”

She only responds with, “ _Harder_.”

His breaths pick up, and he’s barely pulling out of her, each thrust gaining vigor and speed. She unclasps her hands and reaches one back to grip his. She moves it to her hip again. He grasps loosely, and she presses on his fingers, forcing him to clamp down. It aches, and she hums. Her one arms still holding her weight begins to shake with the strain. His rhythm breaks suddenly. After a few uncoordinated thrusts and a spreading, wet warmth inside of her, he slumps against her back and releases her hip.

She pants into the comforter. His heat against her counteracts the cooling sensation tickling across her skin as their combined sweat dries. She allows him a few minutes before shuffling and forcing him to slide off onto the bed. He lays sideways, facing her as she keeps herself pressed face down. His hand comes up slowly. He rests his thumb against the hickey on her neck.

“You never let me leave these.”

She shrugs. “You’re not…someone else.”

“Do they know you do this with me, too?”

She side-eyes him. “He doesn’t know it’s you, exactly, but he knows someone’s responsible for the bruises on my hips.” He opens his mouth. “Don’t. I want them. I asked for them.”

He nods and tips over onto his back. The mess he left begins leaking out of her. She makes no attempt to move.

“Never imagined myself here, Mars.”

“Well, that’s good, because you would’ve been fantasizing about statutory rape.” She lets her eyes close at _that_ word and she clenches unthinkingly, holding the mess in.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” she sighs and turns her head the other way, pins her eyes on the motel’s bathroom door. He’ll take a shower soon, and, when he’s in there, she’ll leave. “It would kill my dear old dad.”

He goes rigid next to her, and she laughs at her own joke. The noise strangles in her throat, and she can’t breathe for a moment. She’s pushing, too far, but she keeps going.

“You know, if the bullets hadn’t.” She laughs again, but halfway through she realizes it’s a sob and doesn’t let herself breathe, or close her eyes, or think.

A hesitant brush against her shoulder. She inches away from the touch, and his hand falls back down onto the mattress.

“Do you want the shower first?” He always asks, just as she always gives the same answer.  


“No, you go. I’ll see you next Thursday.”

The mattress shifts as he stands. “Right. Before I forget, here’s your copy.”

She hears him dig around in his jean pockets before he drops the folded papers by her head. She nods. She studies his back, his buttocks, the cut of his shoulders as he walks to the bathroom and pushes open the door. He doesn’t turn to look at her.

“See you later, Mars.”

“See you, Lamb.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for consensual but aggressive sex and references to character death.  
> All the love in the world for my lovely beta, [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric). Check out her work!


	3. 2.0

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for chapter warnings.

Wednesday’s are always different. There used to be something here, between them, something more than him inside her.

He’s a bachelor without any roommates, so his place is easier and cheaper than the motel, and she likes how it makes him separate from the others. He’s easy. He understands what she needs and never tries to touch her between her legs with his hands. He’s the only one who can get her there without it, and she hates it and craves him.

He scrolls the handcuff down the ratchet teeth until it bites into her wrist. She hums. She thinks about closing her eyes, but she doesn’t. He’s the only one she ever thinks about closing her eyes around.

He loops the chain around the center beam in his headboard before locking the second cuff around her other wrist. His hand is big enough to gather both of her wrists in one grip, and he tugs so that the metal snarls into her skin, assuring her that she’s well and truly trapped.

He’s the only one she trusts with restraints. He’d tried to use padded handcuffs on her after the first time, when she left with burning bruises and one deep scrape, but she refused and snapped, and he hasn’t mentioned them since. She’s seen them, though, tucked away in his bedside table alongside the lubricant she never lets him use.

The dusty air conditioner caught in the mouth of the windowsill murmurs, pulsing out cold air at odd intervals.

His hands skim down her sides, but he doesn’t linger. She holds herself still against the shiver as gooseflesh pebbles across her skin. He pulls her legs apart and slides his lower body up the mattress, letting her thighs wind around his waist as he crouches over her. She welcomes the warmth he always exudes, let’s it counteract the cool breaths of conditioned air. He sits back on his heels.

He’s like a Michelangelo, she thinks. _You’re like a Michelangelo._ She tilts her head and sinks her teeth into the sensitive, thin flesh on the inside of her upper arm to prevent the words from escaping.

She angles her neck in what she hopes is an inviting way. She doesn’t have to seduce him; he would be here if she showed up with unwashed hair and unshaved legs, unlike the others, but she likes the charade. Not for herself, of course, but for him.

His hands whisper back up her body before they plant below each armpit. He leans over her and touches his nose behind her ear. She shudders, and her hips roll where they’re locked around his waist. He exhales shakily into her hair before opening his mouth and pressing first his tongue, and then his teeth, into the skin behind her ear. He works down her jawbone, biting especially hard at the angle. She keeps her head tilted to the side to allow him better access.

“You can do it harder than that, I know you can. If you want.”

He pauses, breathes, and she lets him think for a moment. His teeth, when they find her skin again, bite down firmly.

He shifts, forcing one of her legs to drop from around his waist. His knee moves between her thighs and rubs against her. He’s still wearing his jeans and the grain of the fabric on her draws another shudder through her body. She hooks her other leg tighter, digging her heel into the cleft of his buttocks through his pants. His knee pushes more insistently against her. She grinds down only to halt, unfulfilled, when her handcuffs catch on the rail.

He noses along her chin, guiding her to tip her head the other way so he can set his teeth into the rest of her jawbone. Her mouth falls open, and she swallows back her gasp. He works his way down her neck, pausing at the hollow in the base of her throat to inhale deeply. She clenches her teeth when his knee presses harder.

“Enough…enough foreplay. Come on.”

He pants wet breaths against her chest for several moments. She watches the dark hair, already damp and spiky with sweat, sway when he nods. He moves his knee beneath her thigh again, and she locks her ankles together behind his back. With a sigh, he pushes onto his heels.

He doesn’t look squarely at her but gazes over her head while he works at his fly. His jeans slide down just enough for him to free himself, and then he’s slowly but persistently driving inside her. She hums and helps him by nudging her heels, pulling him into her. He groans and tips his head back, and her breath catches.

_Just like a Michelangelo._

She jerks again with her feet and he falls onto his hands over her, buries his face in her neck. The angle changes startlingly, and he slides all the way in. The freezing teeth of his undone zipper prickle her inner thigh. She wishes, briefly, that she had one hand free to stroke the nape of his neck, to make him feel good and held and considered. The next moment she’s relieved that her hands are bound. It would be too confusing.

“Veronica,” he breaths into her. He raises himself slightly so they’re nose to nose.

She meets his eyes for half a moment before staring at the pocked, popcorn ceiling. He shifts his weight to one arm and lifts the other. He slots his fingers around one half of her neck. His thumb nudges under her chin, his fingers curling to press against her vertebrae. She lets her chin jut up and he pushes down with his thumb, lightly, into the fragile tissue below the bone.

She casts a line into his gaze. His pupils widen, the irises dark enough as to be black. When she lifts her eyebrows and bores the challenge into his eyes, he digs his thumb in harder and harder until she can barely swallow. An angry heat burns through her lungs, and she clings to the sensation. She draws away from herself for a moment as her brain struggles for oxygen. In reward, she tightens around him once, twice, three times in quick succession. He moans, eyelids flickering closed, and circles his hips twice when he’s deepest.

He eases up on his grip until she can drag in a full breath, and then they’re both panting, slightly off-sync, and a humming noise builds in her ears. He frees her neck to brace himself more firmly on both hands.

His movements quicken and they’re racing each other, exhales mixing in warm clouds. His features clench, and she knows he’s trying to hold back, trying to get her there first like he sometimes can, but she tightens again. He punctuates his groan with a last, deep thrust. She wrestles the smile off her lips. He drops his head onto her shoulder and releases inside her.

The twisting ache that was building in her begins to unwind until she’s only left with the vestiges of her arousal and an empty, gnawing sensation. He shifts, and her body attempts to seize the chance but he merely slips out of her and the moment is lost. She lets her legs fall back onto the bed. He slides partly off her. He begins mouthing at her collarbone, and the mattress squeaks as he tries to subtly slide his knee up like before. He barely manages to press it against her when she jerks away.

“No, leave it.”

He releases her collarbone and sighs. His breath warms her upper arm. “Are you sure? I don’t think it would take much.”

She shakes her head before she remembers his face is still burrowed into her shoulder. “I’m sure. I’m good. That was perfect.”

She doesn’t thank him anymore. After the first two times, when his mouth turned down and his gaze soured, she realized how much the gratitude cut. He kisses lazily at her shoulder for a few more minutes before sighing again and lifting fully off her.

He twists away to grab the key from the nightstand. She wants to bite her lip – an old habit – but holds back. He doesn’t meet her eyes as he undoes the cuffs. Still, she can see the tick in his clenched jaw, the narrowing of his eyes, feel the shift in his breathing when he takes in the state of her wrists. She doesn’t look at them, but the ache spreads wonderfully so she has an inkling of what he must see. He is delicate, raw in a way the others aren’t. She ignores the twinge in her stomach.

Once she’s unbound, she slides up the bed and rests her back on the headboard. He leans closer, on his knees again, and she counts five breaths against the side of her neck. He’s thinking, probably counting the bruises that must ring her jaw. Then he nuzzles behind her ear and drops a quick kiss there before he’s up and turning away and walking to the attached bathroom. He doesn’t turn around.

“Bye, Leo. I’ll see you next Wednesday.”

He pauses in the threshold. He flicks the bathroom light on and it haloes his silhouette.

_You could be a Michelangelo._

“Bye, Veronica. Be safe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for bad BDSM etiquette, improper choking technique, and no aftercare.  
> As always, the biggest of thank you's to my fantastic beta, [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric).


	4. 3.0

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for chapter warnings.

She shuffles, spreading her fingers wide across the thin blanket to anchor herself. In this position, she can make out the pattern of the comforter. Blue and purple swirl and clash with a pink she decides instantly should never have been invented. She scowls. They’ve changed the bedding sometime in the past two weeks from the inoffensive green and red and yellow peonies. She misses it.

Papers crinkle behind her as he looks through the forms she left for him on the chair when she arrived. Experimentally, she sways her hips. He releases a guttural noise – he must be watching her – and she sneaks a grin into her clothed shoulder. This, what they do together, is as much for her as it is for him; from the back, draped in an oversized white t-shirt and with her blonde hair, he can pretend she’s someone else. He never calls her by her name until they’re done, though he whispers someone else’s into the nape of her neck when he’s close.

A click, and a newscaster babbles a weather update into the otherwise quiet motel room.

Unlike with Lamb, where she tips onto the bed with her feet still on the floor, she always climbs into the exact middle of the mattress before he arrives and waits on her hands and knees. Like with Lamb, she always faces away from him.

He wanted to try a blindfold once, so he could face her and still keep up his pretense. She vehemently disagreed. It reached such contention that they almost dissolved the arrangement. But here they are, still.

The newscaster chirps that Neptune has reached its fourth highest temperature on record for the past fifteen years.

He brushes a hand across the curve of her left buttocks, right below the hem of her shirt. The touch is so soft it could have been the air from the open window if not for the whisper of accompanying heat. He repeats the motion before palming the flesh firmly, just on the right side of painful. He kneads her for a moment, and then slips his hand around to grip her hip, yanking her down the bed. The blanket offers little traction, so his tug slides her until the tips of her toes hang off the mattress. He releases her. She breathes heavily, tries not to tense, and his own ragged breaths shadow hers. She almost flinches when the television abruptly moves to a commercial break. The moment hangs like suspended dust particles caught in an effusive strip of sunlight. Just when the announcer begins reciting an eight-hundred number for a new, hypoallergenic detergent, his hand connects with her left butt cheek.

The air tumbles out of her mouth with a force that leaves her throat raw. She lurches forward, fingers scrabbling for grip. She barely has a moment to suck in a new breath before his hand collides once more in the same place. He smacks her again and again, hand shifting to almost reach her lower back before changing the angle to sting the top of her thigh, always on the left cheek. The last one hits her squarely between her spread legs. A spike of sensation, pain and something akin to pleasure, pierces through the inside of her. She huffs and folds, tipping from her palms to her elbows. Their harsh breathing clashes in the air like buffeting waves, and her pulse churns so loudly in her ears that she can’t hear the television anymore. She blinks to clear the wet blurring of her gaze but doesn’t let her eyes close.

Several high notes of a jingle advertising a child’s toy manage to puncture through the tempest.

He gives her a moment of respite before the mattress bends and his mouth meets the burning skin. His lips are rough; he’s been biting them again. He licks across the cheek, and she holds herself still. The sensation wavers between that wonderful ache and a spreading numbness. Once he’s covered the entirety of her left cheek, he pulls away. The cool air catches the leftover wetness like quicksand, and she shivers. She turns her head to catch him with her eyes. He’s walking to the window. Wayward strands of sunlight thread through the curtains to stitch glowing patterns across half his face, the half she can see. He pauses there by the window, fisting his hand in the curtain fabric. She lets her gaze slide away and hangs her head. Her pulse finally stumbles and stutters and begins to slow. She misses the way it battered against the skin of her neck like a wave breaking itself across a rock, over and over and over again.

With a feline quiet that contradicts his usual blundering gait, she feels more than hears him return to the edge of the bed. She lets a moan slither out, her version of a _come on_ , and he acquiesces. _What a gentleman._

His hand comes down sharply on her butt cheek, the right one this time. She rocks forward on her elbows from the force and then pushes back towards him right into the next strike. After a dozen more smacks, he rewards her with three sharp hits directly between her legs. This moan is real. He mimics it before pressing his clothed pelvis into the seam of her buttocks and rocking his hips. She pushes back into the sensation. He grinds against her for several breaths, long enough for the jean material to further irritate her sore skin.

With a gusting sigh, he pulls away. She waits as he strips off his boots, pants, socks, boxers. The mattress sinks and he lines his thighs up with hers. In a single, determined thrust he sinks into her. She hums and moans and gasps in the ways she knows he likes. He winds a forearm beneath her abdomen, under the shirt, and tugs her even closer. For a long moment, he lays searing and stiff inside the length of her. She clenches, and then he’s inching out and sliding fluidly back in. He sets the glacial, undulating pace he’s fond of and she thanks him for the bruises she’ll enjoy tomorrow by exhaling soft cries and whimpers. His breathing picks up with his rhythm. He curls over her and noses at the curve of her neck, just above the shirt neckline. She lets her next moan break into a whispering whine and he cries the name into her skin. Instead of collapsing into erratic thrusts like the others when he releases inside her, he presses all the way in, circling his hips as she pulsates around him. She never reaches it herself – only ever with Leo, if at all – but it’s all part of the show for him.

When he’s spent, he draws his arm free and immediately pushes off the bed to stand. She remains where she is, waiting for his cue. He splays his hands across the risen, heated skin on her buttocks.

“You alright there, V?” He presses one thumb in harder, and she winces.

She unclenches the fists her hands had found and wriggles her fingers. “You know me. It’ll take a lot more to break me than a few pansy slaps to the ass.”

He chuckles. His hands continue to smooth over her. “Ain’t that the truth, blondie.”

She grins down at the clashing blue and purple spirals. These particular days don’t quite unravel the knot between her ribs. They don’t leave her as locked out of her mind as she needs to be. But they do ease the tension in his jaw and give him a spring in his step. He finally lets his hands fall and steps back.

“I added my copy to the pile, dated and everything. Man, oh, _man _, what I wouldn’t give to see those redacted names.”__

__She brings her knees in, settling on her side away from the door. Away from him. “You certainly don’t complain about _your_ identity being protected.”_ _

__“And I never will. Hey, all’s fair in love and war.” He chuckles again. She listens to him tug his pants back on. “I just can’t figure out which one this is.”_ _

__She nods. He, more than anyone, makes her feel small. Wallace can judge her into formerly unknown heights of shame, but _he_ looks at her and it’s as if he’s seeing her down to her bones. He knows exactly what drives her here because it drives him, too._ _

__“And even though you won’t follow my advice because, let’s be real, when have you ever, you should put on that cream I got you when you get home. Or, I don’t know, ice it for Gods’ sake. Jesus, it hurts just looking at it.” _Hurts just looking at you_ __

____

__She nods, again, like she always does. He sighs. She tilts her head just barely over her shoulder to look at him. He’s wrestling with his shirt, turning it right side out. She pins her eyes on the tattoo below his left shoulder, at the ghost marking his skin, at the inked name breathed into her mere minutes ago. _Lilly_.It vanishes beneath black fabric. He throws his leather jacket over his shoulder, taps the remote to silence the television, and heads for the door. He doesn’t look back._ _

____

__“Take care, V.” He twists the door knob._ _

____

__“You, too, Weev.” She tucks her chin back to her chest and ignores the smarting in her backside._ _

____

__“You, too.”_ _

____

____

____

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for bad BDSM etiquette, improper spanking technique, and no aftercare.  
> As always, so much love for my dearest beta, [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric). Check out her work!


	5. 2.1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for chapter warnings.

It’s not his day, but she needs him.

She needs – blood thrumming, heart rioting, lungs aching – oblivion. She needs these for all the _right_ reasons, instead of the one driving her here tonight.

He opens his door after five knocks in black briefs and a grey t-shirt. She distracts herself for a moment with the logo – Foo Fighters. 1995. She tries to remember what she did with her dad that year – did they go to the Christmas Tree farm together, with her mom, too? Was that the year she first started begging for a water bed? Did she join the soccer team that year, and send her dad racing around town trying to find the cleats she just _had_ to have? Or was that 1996…

“I need you.”

His eyes widen. He stares at her, lips parting. On any other day, with her tangled hair, lack of a bra, and equal lack of shoes, she would be red with embarrassment. Tonight, though, she doesn’t have that capacity. Still, she shuffles against the intensity of his examination. At the movement, he startles into motion, taking several hurried steps backwards to let her in. She pushes the door closed behind her, presses back into it, and sinks her gaze into his.

“I need you.”

One of his hands twitches at his side, and then he’s surging forward. His palm slides along her neck, thumb digging into her jaw, but she’s not thinking about that, not thinking about _any of it_ anymore, just tilting her chin up to catch his lips. He responds easily, giving way to her. It’s always about what she wants and she loves it, mostly, but she also hates it, _hates_ how selfless he is and how that makes it so easy for her to take and take and take – but here she is.

The door at her back and his weight at her front is smothering. The pressure, the suffocating warmth, cracks open a rift in her ribs and she sighs, relieved, into his mouth. She winds her forearms behind his neck to pull him even closer. His hand leaves her jaw to clutch the back of her thigh and he hikes her up against the door. For a brief, searing moment the shift forces the door handle into her side. She flinches and he sidesteps, readjusting her weight. She locks her legs around his hips, around that offensive, grey shirt with that offensive, mocking year – the year that maybe her dad first talked about adopting a dog, or maybe the year her dad…

“Fuck me. I need you. To fuck me.” She exhales into the small, warm space between their mouths. He moans in response. She tilts her head back and he begins duly laying quick, wet bites into the column of her throat.

She releases one arm from the grip around his neck. Digging a hand between their bodies, she searches for his fly. At the soft, unbroken stretch of fabric her fingers find instead, she falters. She’s never done it this way before, not with him. He always wears his jeans, he always loosens his fly just enough to… _always_. Except – except right now. She fumbles ineffectually with the waistband of his briefs, managing to pull them down an inch on one side. He groans into the bite he just left on her shoulder. The warm breath tickles the wet imprint left by his teeth.

His hold on her thigh loosens as he lowers her to the floor again. He steps back and her hand drops from around his neck. The loss of his warmth draws an ache through her chest and she longs for a quick, solitary moment, to touch him. Instead, she crosses her arms behind her back, against the door. Her spine arches around them, pushing her chest out, but his gaze doesn’t wander. His dark eyes assess hers for a moment, thumb swiping over her lower lip. She nods. She speaks against the tip of his thumb.

“I _need_ you.”

He stops touching her completely and she clenches her crossed arms so she doesn’t reach out. His fingers grasp the hem of the shirt – that infernal shirt – and he tugs it over his head. It lands by his feet. Awkwardly, he shimmies his briefs low enough for him to step out of, and they quickly join his shirt. He’s touching her again and she exhales. His fingers skim her forehead, her cheeks, her neck. He gently – gently, gently – rolls her camisole up her body until he can peel it over her head. He lets it fall. Then, fingertips gossamer light, he explores the jut of her clavicle, the rigid bones of her sternum sunken between her breasts, the small crease just below her belly button. He slides two fingers beneath the waist of her jeans, the ones she’d thrown on blindly in her race to get here, in her race to get away from –

“Not so soft.”

His features wilt.

“Please.” She uncrosses her arms and cups his jaw. His stubble is growing in again. “Not so soft.” She leans forward to ensnare his lips, biting at them. He returns the favor and forces their open mouths together so harshly that their teeth click. She pauses, breathing heavily. “Make me feel real.”

It takes him several tries to release the button from its clasp in her jeans. He tugs the zipper down and sinks to a crouch, dragging her pants with him. She braces a hand on his shoulder, and then both hands, as they work together to free her feet. He kisses the side of her knee, too quickly for her to protest before standing again. He barrels into her, enveloping her, driving her against the door. His sudden ferocity more than the impact knocks the breath from her throat and into the curve between his neck and shoulder. His hands grasp at the back of her thighs again, but right before he can lift her she pushes at his shoulder.

“Stop – wait –”

He immediately releases her and staggers back a few steps, his face pinched in alarm. “Did I hurt you? Are you…” _Alright? Sane? Broken beyond repair?_ “…okay?”

A tentative hand reaches out to pause by her elbow, by her hand, without touching. She nods quickly.

“Yes, I’m – not here. The bedroom. The handcuffs.”

“ _Oh_ …oh.” His fingers reach for her again, but he jerks them back. Instead, he hangs his head, breaking their eye contact, and rubs the back of his neck twice. “Yeah, okay.”

They don’t touch on their walk to the bedroom, him leading, her following. They don’t speak as he opens the drawer to the bedside table and she settles on the tousled sheets. She remains quiet when his hands linger over the padded cuffs before pulling out the metal ones. He says nothing while he fastens her wrists to the headboard – but the rigid set of his jaw says everything. The bedroom window, open as always around the air conditioner, shows only the black expanse of the alleyway it looks out into.

Wordlessly, he drags her underwear down and off. Wordlessly, he opens for him, and he presses into her. Wordlessly, he hesitates inside her and, finally, he looks at her. She doesn’t meet his gaze, pinning her eyes on that familiar pocked ceiling that she can’t make out in the encompassing dark as he begins to move. The snarl of the cuffs, the brand of heat, the quickening breaths fractures something and, at last, eyes firmly open, she lets herself cry.

After – when the handcuffs are back in their drawer, when the prickling panic that drove her here has finally burrowed beneath her skin and gone quiet, when the warmth is drying between her thighs – her turned back burns under his gaze. She twists her head. His eyes study her, but they don’t meet her own. _Turnabout is fair play_ , she reminds herself. She tips her head back around. He needs to get up and go to the bathroom like always so she can leave. Instead, a finger begins tracing the outline of her shoulder blade.

“When you brought me pizza that night at the station, I really couldn’t have imagined ever ending up here with you, like this.”

Her chest clenches. _The station. Where her dad…when her dad…_

“Except…I’m not really talking about the same person, am I, Veronica?” The molasses misery in his voice is impossible to bear with her back turned. She shifts and slides up to lean against the headboard.

“Why aren’t you going to shower?” She examines her knees, but flicks a small glance at him to catch his expression.

His eyes close for a long moment and she marvels at the vulnerability. Then again, he hasn’t learned how to lie with his eyes yet. This might be his way of holding up shields. “Why’d you come here, Veronica?”

She draws her legs up to her chest, then pushes them back down when it feels too telling. She shrugs. He sighs and rolls onto his back. His gaze angles out the window and she wonders if he finds the same voided blackness there as she did earlier.

“Why’d you come to me, ever? Why do we – why do we always do this? Why does it have to be like this?”

She presses her lips together. _You can leave. Just leave. You can leave while he’s out here. Just leave._ He sits up suddenly, violently, and she startles.

“Look, I never ask you questions. All these months, I never have. I take your STD test every two weeks, I bring you the results, I fuck you every Wednesday and leave you with the bruises you ask for. Can’t you – can’t you just give me something? God, please?”

He drops his head against his knees and lifts a hand to knead his forehead. She can’t breathe and yet she must because the words come, dropping like lead.

“Something…happened…to me. Before I met you. And then…it almost happened again. And those were supposed to be the worst nights of my life.” She pauses, fights for air, for courage. “Then I got the call from the – the station. That night. And everything is just here, now.” She taps her temple once, then gestures vaguely over her body. “Everywhere, in me. I can’t escape it. Except for these few hours.”

When she looks at him, his head is lifted again, an ugly emotion dawning in his gaze. _You can take your pity and you can –_

“I’m sorry.” His voice is hoarse. “I’m sorry I asked.”

She swallows, wets her lips, bites one corner. She can do this. “I can use what happens here and…and I can pretend that it’s what happened back then. Because I don’t…remember…what happened. And I tell myself, see, you got through it, it wasn’t that bad, and I can paint over that absence with each memory until it doesn’t matter that I don’t know what happened, some iteration must be close enough. And all of these moments are mine, I get to choose them, so in a way, that moment…it becomes mine, too.”

His face contorts. “So, I’m like…what? A – a _replacement_ for your…Is that how you see me?”

“No, _no_ , of course not. It’s not about you – you’re just –”

The agony in his eyes tears at her. “Yeah, fine, Veronica. I get it. It’s not about me.” He pauses for a long moment as she fights for words…words to fix this, impossible words that don’t exist. Suddenly, he turns to her again. His eyes drill into her, wide, pleading. “Aren’t there enough, then? Haven’t there been enough _iterations_ that we could try other things, that I could make it good for you?”

“It _is_ good for me. You give me exactly what I need.”

He releases a breath and leans toward her. “You know what I mean.”

“I don’t…think…that I can – that I can have it any other way, now. What I need,” She can’t bear to look at him, can’t bear the surrender on his face, can’t bear anything, anymore. She’s supposed to come here to get away from it all. “…has become what I want. This is all I want.”

He exhales sharply and the sound is a blade. She reaches for her underwear and slides them on. _Just leave. You can leave while he’s out here_. But then he stands before she can move and walks jerkily to the bathroom. He doesn’t turn on the light. He pauses in the threshold, hand rising to grip the doorjamb.

“I’ll see you –” His voice breaks. She clenches her hands into fists and collapses into herself. She did this. _You did this._ “I’ll see you next Wednesday, Veronica.”

She knows what comes next. Her throat aches. She manages to crawl off the bed, stumbling toward the door to the main room. He doesn’t turn around.

“See you then, Leo.” She ignores the thickness in her throat. She flees. She wants to cry again, but she doesn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for referenced sexual assault, referenced character death, handcuffs, and dissociative sex.
> 
> Seriously, my beta [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric) is the most amazing person ever. Go check out her incredible work!!!


	6. 3.1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for chapter warnings.

She knows what day it is. She knows. _How could I ever forget?_ And she knows that _he_ knows. From his heavy, thudding footsteps. From the carefully controlled way he breathes while she rocks hesitantly on her forearms and knees. From the broken-off groan as he must take in her and her costume – the costume to look like _her_. But really, she knows because _how could he ever forget?_

A finger skates up her spine, dragging the white shirt up and up and up to her shoulder blades. The touch is so light that she wonders if today, maybe, he won’t hurt her. She bites her lip at the thought, lets her teeth sink deep until she can lick at the tang of blood. Then his fingers settle into her hair. The softness becomes tightness, firmness, sharpness. His blunt fingernails tangle into the roots of her hair, scraping at her scalp. She hums. He leans over her, a searing, heavy weight across her back. His other hand braces next to her elbow. Hot words scald her ear.

“ _How could you do this to me?_ ” He rasps. He bites down on the delicate arch of her ear. His jaw trembles, and she can imagine the pain if he just set his teeth harder, deeper, holds still against the promise of his barely contained rage. Fractionally, he tightens his jaw. She releases the breaths lunging up her throat in short, even exhales. His grip loosens. He jerks his head away. His fingers tighten and he yanks her head back. She stifles her cry behind closed lips.

A warm, clothed knee pushes between her thighs, forcing her to readjust her stance. He tips back and, with the hand locked in her hair, drags her with him. He tugs her back until she can stare straight at the motel wall. He’s still standing, one foot on the ground, his knee between her legs. Beneath her upper back, his stomach heaves in violent pulses to the rhythm of his breaths. Her lungs constrict in her chest. With the hand in her hair, he gives her head a short, rough shake and an exhale stutters out.

He pushes her head down until she’s forced to sink her full weight onto his knee. She can feel each individual grain of his jeans where they’re pressed against her. His knee rocks up just barely. She can’t help the involuntary squirm that shudders through her. Without warning, his fingers release their grip from her hair and he shoves her back down to the bed. She lands, taking the force on her cheek, with a slight bounce.

His voice, this time, crackles as though he’s speaking through a radio. Eddies of agony churn in his words. “How _could_ you?”

His belt buckle rattles and then the leather is pressed into her open palm, his first true acknowledgement of ¬her. She drags her head up and down the comforter in an exaggerated nod. The belt leaves her hand. Her fingers curl slightly, chasing after the lost weight. She listens as he folds it, listens as he breathes, but she doesn’t hear the whistle of air before it snaps down.

She chokes out a groan into the mattress. The belt is different than the hand, and it’s been so long since they’ve done this…she revels in the next strike, neck arching and head tipping up as she grits her teeth. The third hit is followed by a soft tap in the center of her back – a question. She repeats the purposeful nod.

In quick succession, three sharp beats, then four, then five, rain down against the tender skin. She groans through her clenched teeth.

“You _bitch_ ,” he snarls. Through the rage that heaves itself indelibly, intangibly against her back, comes the soft tap of the question. She jerks her head up and down. _Yes_ , she thinks. _Keep going_ , she urges. _Hurt me_ , she begs. His next words tear out of him, voice catching, breaking, choking. “ _You left me!_ ”

On the bedspread, directly beneath her nose so that she has to go cross-eyed to see it, a red pinprick glows like a sniper target. The pinprick pulses, a small, red sun. When the next blow falls, the red haze – it doesn’t expand so much as comes towards her, approaching, engulfing, consuming. Tinnitus buzzes in her ears to the beat of the pulse, pulse, pulse of the swallowing red. Sweat quivers in trembling droplets along her fingers, her hands, her arms like a fragile, insulating second skin, like bubble-wrap. The crimson haze swarms her vision. The center, where that pinprick started, greys, goes black, distorts, until she’s plunging down the tunneling redness into a blank, dark place where the tinnitus suddenly goes dead, and everything is dead. And back there, somewhere, somehow, the belt falls and hits and cracks, but she’s here and she can’t feel a thing. She’s a small, perfect nothing in the huge, perfect redness, and she can’t feel a single, goddamn thing.

She never wants to leave.

She comes back in fits and starts. A warm, calloused hand is kneading pinpricks of sensation back into the numb flesh of her buttocks.

“You okay?” His voice rasps raggedly. She nods, cheek dragging against the fabric. Her eyes are wet, she notices dully. “I still can’t believe she’s –”

She stays quiet. His hands leave her. She lifts her head and twists, so her other cheek presses against the bedspread.

He clears his throat. “Remember,” his words get caught and he swallows thickly, “remember to put cream on those, alright, V?”

Again, she nods. She thinks maybe she won’t look back at him. His belt rattles, and fabric murmurs, and laces rasp against one another. The usual crinkle as he sets the paperwork on the motel desk chair precedes the door opening. She thinks maybe she won’t look back, but then she does. He doesn’t.

“Bye, Weev.” She whispers.

He doesn’t respond, and she wonders how he’ll spend the last few hours of Lily’s anniversary. She doesn’t offer for him to spend them with her. The door opens and then slams shut, and she wonders how she’ll spend the last few hours of the anniversary of her dead best friend. She doesn’t know.

She doesn’t know, but she thinks she’ll spend it here in this empty motel room, with the ache inside and out. She thinks she’ll try to be like Lily, and she won’t blink or move or breathe. She thinks until she doesn’t anymore. And then she sleeps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for improper BDSM etiquette, spanking with a belt, no aftercare, and implied/referenced character death. All the love in the world for my dear, wonderful beta [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric).


	7. 0.1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for chapter warnings.

“Look…” He sighs. “You-Know-Who is back.”

“Voldemort? But I thought the Boy-Who-Lived got rid of him once and for all during the Second Wizarding War! Oh, Wallace! You know what he does to Muggles like us. Whatever shall we _do_!”

He stares.

She cocks an eyebrow.

His face drops. “V, c’mon.”

She sighs and shifts her gaze. “Yeah, I already knew.”

“Okay, I’ll bite, how? I ran into him yesterday at the Sac-N-Pac and he said he only got back that morning. I know you’ve been with…y’know…all yesterday afternoon so, seriously, how?”

She shoots him a half smirk. “P.I.’s never reveal their secrets.”

“That’s magicians, thank you very much.”

“Ugh, fine. You are no fun.” Still, she hesitates, takes a sip of her lemonade, sets her teeth on the plastic rim, releases it, places the cup back on the metal lattice tabletop with a clang, licks the taste from her upper lip. “I have an alert set if any of his known credit cards are used in a Neptune zip code. It went off yesterday. Well, actually two days ago, but right before midnight, so he wasn’t being totally untruthful.”

He sighs. She refuses to look up and meet what’s sure to be his patented Veronica-I’m-disappointed gaze. “Oh, V.”

She was wrong. It’s worse. That’s his Veronica-I-pity-you voice and it draws her head up with a snap. Before she can bite out any words, he continues.

“I thought you were done with this stuff…tracking people’s phones, setting alerts, keeping tabs. If I go out to my car right now, will I find a tracker in the rear wheel well?”

She jerks forward and shakes her head. “No, Wallace, _no_. I promise I’m not keeping tabs on you or anything. I set this alert a while ago and I honestly forgot about it. I am done with it, sworn off, promise.”

His nod happens in slow motion as he clearly mulls over her words. “Okay. Okay, I believe you. We just don’t need a repeat of 2008 Veroni-gate.”

“That’s such a stupid name, you know I hate that name.”

“But it’s so apropos,” he whines. “Plus, it _rhymes_.”

She can’t help but cough out a laugh. She covers it by taking the last sip of her lemonade lest he confuse her amusement with approval. In the few seconds that it takes her to do so, he has rearranged his face back into the picture of nonchalance, and that’s how she knows the interrogation is coming.

“So, since you’re really done with it, and you just got a reminder of that alert you so-called ‘forgot’ about, that means you’ve dismantled it now, right?”

Her mouth hangs open for a moment too long. “Uh, yes, _yes_ , that would be correct, sir. Hit it on the nose, my dear Watson.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“Well, it _will_ be correct in forty-five minutes when I go home and get right on that.” She flashes him a quick grin.

He shakes his head in dutiful disapproval but the corner of his lip is twitching. He slides the rest of his fries across the table to her, the ones she’s been pilfering from all morning. It’s a classic you’re-an-idiot-but-I-still-love-you gesture and she grins unabashedly at him.

“What’s your plan, then? Are you going to see him? He’s probably at the Neptune Grand.” He lifts a finger when the waitress passes by.

She swallows her grin and drags a fry through the garlic-lime sauce that accompanied her arugula salad. “I don’t know. I don’t have a plan. Plus, the last time the two of us were there together, well…you know what happened.”

“Ah, yes, the famed Madison incident and its glorious fallout. Look, I’m not saying I want the two of you back together – you’ve got your whole _deal_ going and he’s, well, he’s Logan Echolls, which is to say that half of his personality is just being an asshole – but you haven’t seen him in three years and maybe it’s time for, I don’t know, closure.”

“Closure?” She wrinkles her nose and sticks her tongue out. “Gross, Wallace, I can’t believe you said that. I thought we agreed you’d muffle the maturity when we’re in public, it’s just downright indecent.”

He levels her with a glare. “Ha. Ha. Seriously. It’s not like you ever take my advice, but maybe just think about it. Who knows how long he’ll stick around this time, and then your window will close.”

She steals the check when the waitress brings it by and waves him off. “My treat. As a thank you for your wonderful advice, and because I basically ate half of your meal.”

“Damn, right.” He laughs.

She tucks the appropriate bills, plus tip, into the crease. She casts a glance out the window, mulling over his words. She purses her lips as an idea slowly takes root.

“Thanks, sugarplum. Coffee next week, before work?” She scoots her chair backwards. As if he’d read her mind, he snags her forearm the moment she stands and pins her with an uncharacteristically solemn look. “What?”

“I know how you tick, Veronica Mars. And there’s no love lost between me and Logan, but if you drag that poor guy into your…your situation, or whatever, you’ll break his heart. That man loved you once, and if he’s anything like he used to be he’s incapable of saying no to you. So, I’m saying it for him. No, Veronica. Leave him out of it. If you’re going to see him for closure, then go for it. But if you’re going to see him to drag him down into your den of destitution, then just don’t. Those other guys might be able to pull themselves out of your wreckage fine and unharmed, but you’ll ruin him. You will.”

She swallows against the rising hurt. _Your wreckage_. He drops her arm but she keeps it held in midair. She shakes her head, not in denial of his words but to push her hair away from her face and give herself a moment to respond. She tweaks a smile out of her lips. “Den of destitution, huh?”

He grimaces. “I don’t know what to call your arrangement, or whatever, and _please_ don’t offer me any suggestions.”

She drops her eyes to the floor, urging her feet to move. Still, she stays frozen. “You don’t…um. Are you…You don’t consider yourself stuck in my – my _wreckage_ , do you?”

She musters the courage to lift her head, to see his face and whatever answers lie there. His lips part, almost imperceptibly, and his eyes widen.

“No, Veronica. God, no, of course not. You’re my best friend. I didn’t…I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I’m here for you, always, like a – a barnacle. You’re stuck with me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She exhales shakily. His eyes burn into her, emphasizing his earnestness. She nods. He pushes his chair back suddenly and then she’s wrapped in a tight embrace.

“You’ve got me, V, I promise.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for...Harry Potter series spoilers? Endless love for my dear, my lovely, my phenomenal beta [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric).


	8. 2.2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for chapter warnings.

They’re marionette dolls, now. They’re dragged through the motions, the sounds, the sensations. Grief and hesitance make his once-familiar hands foreign and hateful when they press, and grasp, and push. She thinks that they’re like actors filming a sex scene, before the editing and the music turns everything rose-colored and sweet. Their breaths are too loud now; the air conditioner rattles heaving gasps and leaves everything shriveled and cold where once the aching heat burned. She can’t forget here, anymore.

She’s kneeled facing the wall, cuffed hands braced on the railing of the headboard. He presses close behind her and she slumps her shoulders more, curves away from his broad warmth. The urge to close her eyes, the urge that once sat so close under her skin when she was here with him, is distant and remote. He slides out and then back in. The race in their rhythm is gone.

She twists her hand in the cuffs, watches the skin tighten and wrinkle and blush as the small forking veins pant urgently against the pressure. She thinks of a caught rabbit and the desperate, thin jerk of its chest. She twists harder. The metal snarls. She hums. The blood blooms like light fading across a horizon at sunrise. There’s no pain, only the sharp, satisfying rush of gratification.

He releases a long, low noise behind her. He slips out and his weight at her back vanishes. She frowns and turns her head as much as she can, cuffs clanging against the rail. He won’t meet her eyes. Hasn’t since… _since_. She glances between his legs to confirm the reason for his sudden absence.

He gestures suddenly at her. “That…I can’t…that doesn’t…”

She follows his gaze. _Oh_. The red congeals at the rim of the cuff and smears down her forearm when she moves her hand. She curls her fingers into a fist.

“It’s not the first time.” She shrugs and looks back at him.

The muscle in his jaw jumps. He turns his head to stare out the window, eyelids fluttering against a wave of conditioned air. She settles more firmly on her knees and aims her eyes back at the wall, away from him.

“That doesn’t…make it…” He sighs. “I can’t be someone who hurts people, Veronica.”

She flinches.

“I thought, at first…when you said you needed me, I told myself I was helping you.” He pauses. When he continues, his voice is warped, throttled. “I’m so ashamed.”

She jerks back around. His eyes are wet, lips twisting, face compressed. The air leaves her lungs. Her chest hurts, but it’s the wrong kind of hurt, not the kind she comes here for. She shakes her head.

“The girl I’d…my dream girl, the girl I…she showed up at my door, and she asked for my help, and I’d wanted her for so long and I…” His turns away from the window to pin her with his stare. “I’m supposed to help people.”

She tries to lean forward but the cuffs bite at her wrists. “You do. _You do_. You help people, and you’re helping me. I came to you, that’s nothing to be ashamed of. I asked for this.”

“You’re bleeding. You’re bleeding on my pillow.” His voice goes thin. “I thought, maybe…I could help you. I thought you’d get better. I thought I was helping.”

“You _are_ helping.”

He jolts upright. “How, Veronica? How? Ever since your dad –”

“Don’t you fucking talk about my dad.” She snarls and her hands yank against the cuffs. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

“That’s just the thing, Veronica! You won’t talk to anyone about it. You just come here and expect…I don’t know, you bury it all away. You _said_ you come here, come to me, to try and deal with what happened to you. I think you just come here to escape it. You don’t have to talk to me about it, you don’t even really have to talk to someone else if you don’t want to, but you have to stop pretending.” His head hangs, the breath raggedly running out of him. Her lungs hurt. She can’t breathe. He shuffles across the bed on his knees until he can reach the key on the bedside table. His hands are gentle – gentle, but so foreign – on her forearms as he undoes the cuffs. She faces the wall again and lets her hands drop when the cuffs fall away.

Finally, she finds air. “You want to know what happened? What really happened? You want your piece of the truth? If I tell you, does this end, this – you and your questions and your–your _squeamishness_? Because I bet, after I tell you, you’re going to want this blood on my hands as much as I do.”

The sheets rustle behind her. She presses her hand against the wall for support.

“You don’t have to tell me, but I’ll take that bet, Veronica, and I’ll win it, because I would _never_ want that.”

She scoffs. She twists to face him, finally, and his brown eyes turn amber under the glint of sunlight streaking through the curtains. “I wish I had never pushed him to run for re-election.” She sighs and shakes her head when he opens his mouth to object. “But that’s not it, not really.”

His features soften and he watches her, gaze open, encouraging. She wonders if it’ll stay that way after she tells him. She can’t bear to see that change and tucks her chin down, focusing on the red smear across her wrist.

“I borrowed his gun. The day before…it happened. He was off duty for the rest of the night so I – I knew he wouldn’t need it. I went down to the River Styx. I was following a case and, well, it led me there. Liam Fitzpatrick and I…we have some, er, unfinished business. So, I brought the gun. I had no plans to use it – no license for it, at any rate, but I needed it for show. I took…I took the bullets out, the hollow points, because if I did have to use it, I didn’t want them to be identified as police grade. On the off-chance something went down. I put in a single bullet – cast lead – just in case. It was a good thing, too, or so I thought at the time. Liam was his usual… _charming_ self and he didn’t believe the gun was loaded, or that I’d have the guts to fire. So, I shot a hole in the wall. After that, he was the picture of cooperation. I got my info, he got a classy wall decoration for that pig sty, and that was that.”

She pauses. Someone’s expanding a balloon in her chest and she can’t breathe around it. She wraps her hand around her ankle, squeezing. She doesn’t dare look up at him. The words catch and snarl in her throat, but she forces them out anyway.

“I put his gun back. Right where I found it. He had it on him when…when it happened. But it didn’t do any good. It didn’t do _any goddamn good!_ ” She screams suddenly, hoarsely, and releases her ankle to twist and grab one of the pillows. She hurls it across the room. It bounces unspectacularly off the wall and lands on the floor without a sound. She curls in on herself and keens. The world smears into watercolors and a single, wet drop winds down her cheek to land, glistening, on her bare leg. She pants raggedly into her knees. He shifts forward but stops when she flinches. “Because he had the gun. Oh, yes, he had the gun, alright. And I had each and every one of those fucking hollow points still tucked _in my fucking jacket pocket_.”

She wraps her arms around herself and digs her fingers into her ribs, tight, holding everything in that threatens to spill out. A soft touch at her shoulder. She shudders away.

“Don’t. Don’t fucking touch me. Just go take your shower. Just…go.”

The bed creaks. She glances sideways out of the cage of arms and legs to watch him walk to the bathroom. He flicks the light on. The halo, again. He pauses in the doorway for a long, long moment. And then, he turns around.

He approaches slowly. Her head lifts and her arms drop away. She wants to leave, flee, hide. Instead, she stays caught in his gaze. Trapped in the warm, sharp eyes that cut through all of her. His hands are soft around her face. One thumb strokes up and down her cheek, wipes away the wetness there. There’s no more air. He leans closer. She can’t breathe. His eyes slide closed. She can’t think. His lips touch hers.

This close, she can make out his constellation of freckles. This close, she can taste the air leaving his lungs and she’s never been closer to another human being. This close, she can suddenly, finally think again.

She tears herself free, stumbling off the bed and crashing into the opposite wall.

“What – what –”

He follows. His hands reach for her. She shudders violently and they drop. His eyes widen and he trips over his own feet. Realization blooms in his gaze but it’s too late – _too late_ , she thinks.

“Wait, wait, Veronica, wait, I’m – I’m sorry.”

“You’re not.” She brushes a finger across her lips where he somehow lingers. She shakes her head. “You’re not. This is – was a long time coming. I have to…I have to leave.”

She spins and flings a hand out to brace against the wall before tumbling out of the bedroom and into the main room.

“Wait, Veronica, please, I’m sorry. It’ll never happen again, I swear.”

“No, no.” She murmurs. She’s still naked. She spins and there they are, her clothes in a mess on the bedroom floor. Between her and them, he takes up almost the whole doorway. She clenches her fist and shoves past him. “It will. This was a mistake. I should’ve never…this wasn’t fair. I shouldn’t have brought you into it. You were right, you can’t help me.”

“Veronica, what are you saying? Stop, please, can’t we just – let’s just pretend it never happened.”

She yanks her underwear on and slips the dress over her head. She stretches an arm back to tug the zipper up, but her reach is too short. She huffs in frustration. Careful hands brush against her back, grasping the zipper. She jerks away. “Don’t – _don’t_.”

His face collapses in agony. “Please, Veronica. I’m…” He turns his head away, eyes wide against the damp sheen she sees forming. He inhales deeply. He brings his head back to look at her. The tears poise at the edge of his eyelids but don’t fall. “I’m sorry.”

She swallows. “Me, too.”

Once again, she slips past him, snagging her purse off the couch in the main room, and races to the door. She glances back for a single, solitary moment at him framed in the doorway. _Just like a Michelangelo_. She turns to the door.

“Will I –” his voice cracks, catches, breaks, “will I see you next Wednesday?”

She twists the door handle.

“Veronica?”

She doesn’t look back. “Bye, Leo.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for self-harm, implied/referenced character death, and canon divergence. Re: canon divergence: this work is set several years after season 3. Clearly, Lamb is still alive which is divergent from canon in and of itself. In the world of this fic, Keith Mars did still run for re-election in season 3 (but not against Vinnie) and beat out Lamb. Since Mr. Mars' passing, Lamb has been reinstated as sheriff and thus is currently the head of the Sheriff’s department. I know - it's a confusing world I've created, but in truth, I don't think it alters the integrity of this work. Simply wanted to explain!
> 
> Let's give three cheers for my incredible beta, [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric). Without her, none of this would be possible!


	9. 1.1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for chapter warnings.

Something’s wrong. He’s late – he’s _never_ late. She curls her toes against the carpet. Unease creeps up her spine and she gives into the urge, sinking her teeth into her lower lip. She clenches her fingers, stretches them, clenches them again, before shoving off the bed and throwing herself into a violent pace back and forth across the room. Her lip hurts. She checks the clock on the wall, the moment losing its gravity as the television set blares over any potential ominous ticking that might accompany the progression of the longest needle. She angles her gaze at the screen. It’s the channel set by the last person in the motel room – the maid, perhaps, watching while pretending to replace the sheets after the last guest. _Yeah_ , she thinks. _No fresh bedsheets smell like that_. A woman with glossy, voluminous hair screams shrilly when a man – tall, dark, and handsome – bursts through the door on screen.

The next moment, the motel door slams open. She flinches, eyes flickering from the television to the man in the doorway.

She takes in the clenched jaw, the hooded eyes, the searing gaze in the seconds before he drives her against the wall. His hand finds her neck and she gasps even as she lifts her chin higher. And then she can’t push out any more air, or drag any in, and her arm spasms at her side. His entire body presses her against the wall. His teeth embed themselves in her lower lip where her own gnawed there just minutes ago. He groans and lifts her higher by her neck. Her toes scrape against the carpet. He releases her lip only to stab his tongue into her mouth. Her vision sparks and she’s reminded of gazing through a kaleidoscope as a child. Her head is heavy and yet so light, like a rising wind might simply carry it away.

He finally jerks away from her, hand still in place. He pants and drags his gaze up and down her naked body. Then he uses his grip to fling her toward the bed, letting go at the last second so she drops onto the bedspread. She stares at the ceiling and drags in air. By the time she’s able to lift her head, he’s stripped bare. Their eyes meet, but she doesn’t seem _him_ anywhere in the gaze. And then, he’s on her again. He grips her waist and flips her over onto her stomach. His weight collapses on her, only barely lightened by a single arm braced next to her shoulder. The other arm winds below her right knee. She gasps again as he yanks her leg up, bringing her knee almost to her armpit. Her hips lift off the bed and her back arches to accommodate the stretch. With his thigh, he keeps her other leg pinned still. Rapid, heavy breaths moisten the nape of her neck. He buries his face into the curve of her shoulder and groans.

“Let me, Veronica.” He grits out into her skin. “Say yes. Let me.”

She pants. His weight suffocates her. She thinks, but only a little. “Yes.”

With a hoarse grunt, he pushes inside her. She jerks automatically before forcing her muscles to loosen. He drives deeper. She frees an arm trapped under her body and claws at the bedspread. For a brief moment, something distracts her. _No fresh bedsheets smell like that._ She twists her head to rest on the other check, away from the offensive odor, just as he sinks in the rest of the way. He pauses there for a moment and the labored breaths continue to pulse against her neck. He disentangles his arm from the crook of her leg. She holds it in place, stays stretched open for him. Her chest struggles to rise against his pressing weight. He lifts off her slightly, bracing his other arm by her head. She breathes. He pants. He pulls back, almost leaving her entirely, before thrusting in again and setting a violent pace. The ache tears through her, unraveling her taut muscles until she jerks loosely like a ragdoll beneath his vigor. A chasm splits open, her on one side, everything else on the other, and she sighs at the sudden, explosive quiet in her head.

He draws out completely, stops, with no warning. She almost cries at the loss and the immediate onslaught of thoughts as they come charging back across the chasm. She clenches around nothing. She groans, frustrated to be so empty and yet so full, and neither in the right way.

“What?” She hisses. “I can flash you if you went soft but if not _get back here_.”

“God,” he murmurs. He rolls off her in a single motion and splays, face up, on the bed. He lays his forearm over his eyes. “God.”

She pushes up until she’s kneeling. “That’s very flattering, but it’s Veronica.”

He shakes his head.

“Come on, that was kinda funny. Even _you_ have to agree that was a little, teensy bit funny.”

Silence.

“Not even a pity laugh?” She studies what she can see of his face. She sighs. Behind her, the television audio asks _what are you doing here, Frederick?_ “What is it? You came in here like a man on fire and you were late. Fess up.”

“He got away,” he mutters finally. He twists over onto his knees and pummels the mattress twice with his fist. His chest heaves. “Fled the country.”

“A suspect?”

“Not a suspect. It was him. No doubt whatsoever. He’s a fucking cop-killer and now he’s sipping Mai Tai’s on some white beach somewhere that isn’t fucking here. Probably went someplace with impossible extradition policies. Jesus, we almost had him. That’s why I was late. That’s why I was…” _Crazy? Inhuman? Perfect?_

But she’s not listening anymore. _Cop-killer, cop-killer, cop-killer_. Her heart pounds to the rhythm marshalling in her head. _Cop-killer, cop-killer_. She shakes her head slowly. Matters at hand.

“Why’d you stop?”

“Why’d I stop. God.” He points a trembling finger at her neck. She swallows and belatedly realizes how much the movement hurts. He slides until his feet rest on the floor, elbows on his knees, hunched over. “I’m not a good man, Mars. I know I’m not.”

“Yeah.” She thinks about that morning in his office after Shelley Pomroy’s party, how he told her to go see the wizard and ask for a little backbone. Thinks about him letting her and Duncan go free after they broke into the Manning’s house on the child abuse case, the haunted look on his face and past ghosts lingering in his eyes. Quieter, she repeats. “Yeah.”

“But that’s what makes me so good at this, huh?” He waves a hand and somehow manages to capture their arrangement, her bruises, his handprints, in the single gesture.

She casts a glance at him from the corner of her eye and then nods.

“It’s one of the reasons you chose me, right?”

“…right.”

“You thought – you thought, well now, who’s the only person I would sleep with – fuck – if I hated myself? And it was me. And that’s what makes me the best at it, right?”

She keeps her gaze on the television set. Voluminous-Hair-Lady reels Tall-Dark-and-Handsome – Frederick, perhaps? – into her bedroom by his tie.

“I’m better at it than all the others because you can only hate yourself as much as you need to when you’re fucking me.”

 _No._ She wants to say. _You’re wrong_. But after last week, with Leo, the words stick in her throat. Instead, she says, “The longer you _don’t_ fuck me, the less use I have for you.”

He nods. When she looks at him, just barely, his eyes flash, and she knows he heard the affirmation in her words. But he doesn’t say anything, just stands and positions himself behind her when she rolls back onto her stomach. His hands, when they find her hips, grip harder than ever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: choking, forceful sex, implied/referenced character death, implied/referenced child abuse, and implied/referenced sexual assault. Lots of love to my beta [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric).


	10. 3.2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for chapter warnings.

He’s fifteen minutes late, and she’s never been very good at being patient. She finally relents and grabs her phone from the pocket of the jeans she’d left in a mess on the floor. The line rings with a sharp, brisk _brill_ three times before clicking. A gusting breath drifts through the speakers.

“I’m – I’m sorry, V. I’m not there.”

“Any person with eyes would know that. How far out are you? If you take too long, I’ll get started without you.”

The silence brings with it a sinking realization. She shakes her head, schools her thoughts in other directions. _It doesn’t mean anything. He’ll be here soon_.

“…V, I’m not in Neptune.”

“Okay, cool, vacations are always a blast. I mean, thanks for letting me know. Least you could’ve done is schedule a rain check – sheesh, talk about _rude_.”

This silence, if possible, weighs even heavier than the first.

“Weev? Talk to me. Did someone drive you out of town? Is it the PCHers? They want you to come out of retirement or something? Because I’ve told you, time and again, just make them some friendship bracelets! Friendship bracelets solve everything. Or is it the Sheriff’s Department? Because friendship bracelets would almost definitely work there, too. I mean, have you met Deputy Sacks? One look at a friendship bracelet and that man will be putty in your hands. _Putty_ , I tell you. Here, I’ll come meet you, wherever you are, and we can chat, work whatever it is out together.”

“When’s the last time we chatted, V?”

She smooths a finger along her eyebrow, pushing up at the end of the length to rub at her temple. “Last...last Thursday?”

“No, no, I mean actually communicated, about…anything. Anything real.”

Her eyes hurt. _Why do my eyes hurt?_

“So…what? I didn’t give you enough anecdotes about my day-to-day so you had to take off for a few days? Okay, here’s one: yeah, so today, this _asshole_ totally skipped –”

He cuts her off. “V…it’s not for a few days.”

“Okay…okay, so what are we talking, a week? Two? A month?” She runs a hand across the bedspread. What she wouldn’t give for those peonies right now.

“I don’t know, V, I really don’t. Maybe...maybe months.”

“Months?”

“Maybe years.”

_Years?_

She clears her throat. “Is this...is this really because of me? Look, I’m – I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you to talk to. I thought this thing – I thought it helped you, too. I thought it was what you wanted.” She winces at the pleading edge her voice rises to.

“V,” He sighs. “I can’t keep going to a motel room to pretend to fuck the girl I love. That girl is dead.” _Lilly is dead._

Deep breath in. Deep breath out. Deep breath – “When did this…when did it change?”

“God, I don’t even know, V. All I know is, I can’t keep doing this to myself. And I can’t keep doing this to you.”

“But I – I want it.” He’s not even here, in the room with her – and isn’t that the problem? – and yet, somehow, he’s still seeing her down to her bones.

“I know you do.” His voice quiets. “I know. But that’s like…it’s like stabbing someone because they say they want to die. If you want to destroy yourself, I can’t be complicit in it anymore. I’m giving you back the knife.”

“I don’t even – Some light spanking is a popular sex activity for a lot of people, alright –”

“This isn’t ‘light spanking,’ V. This is…this is agony and grief and hatred disguised as sex. Look, the girl I love is dead. And the girl you used to be, she’s dead, too. I think we both gotta stop pretending.”

“Weevil…Eli…why...” she clears her throat. She sees Lilly on a pool float, pale flowers wilting in the drag of chlorinated water. She sees herself there, too, on the float next to Lilly. “If you loved – love her...why, when you pretend she’s me, do you hit me? Hit her? Did she – was that something...?”

“No, no…God, she would’ve castrated me for trying. Don’t get me wrong, she was _fierce_ to be with, but no.”

“Then, why…?”

He sighs. “I loved her. Still do. Probably…probably always will. I mean, I’ve got her damn name tattooed on me, so I fucking better. But I also hated her. She used me. I was another one of her secret distractions when she was taking a break from Rich Pencil-dick the Second – uh, sorry, V. And, so. Yeah…maybe, maybe I want to punish her, sometimes. But I can’t. And it wasn’t fair to take it out on you, as willing as you were. As much as I wanted...needed to pretend that she was there, and warm, and soft, before I could do any of that I needed to hurt her. Now I just gotta let her go.”

She doesn’t know what to say. A confession for a confession? _You were as much a surrogate for someone else as I was for her_. Instead she says, “All’s fair in love and war, right?”

He huffs. “Yeah, V. I guess. But maybe it shouldn’t be.”

She stands up to close the curtains tighter and the sudden, collapsing darkness bundles around her like an embrace. She sinks back onto the bed where just a week ago this voice over the phone was pressing the name of her dead best friend into her skin.

“I don’t think there’s anything more I can say, V, except…except get some help, maybe. I mean, ahhh-ha, who am I talking to. As if you’ve ever listened to me. But maybe you’re Veronica Mars, still, and Veronica likes a challenge. So, I’m putting it out there, Veronica Mars: get some help, I dare you.”

A sudden flood of voices, in the background. Buzzing through the speaker. Warmth and liveliness.

The circulated air coughs and hiccups out of the motel vent, sending a cascade of shivers through her.

“Are you somewhere safe, Weev?”

She imagines him in front of the window, gazing out beyond the four walls of the motel room, a lattice of sunlight embroidering his cheekbone, his temple, his lips.

“Yeah, V, I’m somewhere safe.”

She imagines him poised by the motel door, hand on the knob, twisting it.

“Take care, V.”

She imagines the door opening and him not looking back.

“You, too, Weev.” She murmurs. The line goes dead. “You, too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for implied/referenced character death, discussed improper BDSM etiquette, and discussed grief. Huge, heaping piles of love for my fantastic beta [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric).


	11. _._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for warnings.

Her last conversation with Wallace is tar, sticky and dark, at the edges of her mind.

She ignores it.

She hasn’t been here in four years. The lacquered floor, the red accented hall lights, and the wood-paneled walls of Neptune Grand all look exactly the same. She coaxes his room number out of the secretary in the lobby, and then she rides up the elevator with its aspen tree wallpaper, which hasn’t changed at all, either. She knows that smell is the biggest memory trigger, but it’s the echoing _¬pring_ of the elevator door as it opens to the eleventh floor, not the timeless flavor of coconut lemongrass air freshener, that captures her in a still-life until she can remember to breathe.

Has it really been four years?

 _1146_. A door on the right. She walks down the hallway until she reaches it and stares at the gold numbers nailed to the wall. It's a different room than the one he used to live in. _Same floor, different room. Same people, different time._ Only, she doesn’t feel like the same person.

His old door, his old room, their old life – it’s ten steps further down the hall, and on the left – room _1149._

Her feet turn left.

In a pique of sentimentality, she lays her palm flat on the dark wooden door. She remembers what it was like when he opened it that morning after the alternative prom. She remembers Kendall appearing behind him, naked, and his amnesia of the night before. What had Kendall said? “ _Just Veronica Mars…what a disappointment._ ” The muscles in her stomach clench as though she’s just taken a punch. Her lungs stall briefly, and then she breathes. The memory makes it easier to jerk away and walk to _1146_. She lifts her hand but doesn’t knock.

She thinks about Weevil’s exhales over the phone: the full, relieved ones she hasn’t heard him breath since before…before. She thinks about not looking back at Leo’s face and the beg of his hands at her body. Not at her body, though, not really. He wanted Something deep inside her; Something intangible, unreachable; Something that she couldn’t ever allow him to see, let alone touch. She finally knocks.

The door opens just as she realizes that she isn’t ready to see him. She bites her lip. She looks up. If he’s shocked or surprised, he doesn’t let any of it show across his face. Instead, his languid gaze travels down and then back up her body.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Veronica Mars. As short as ever.” His sardonic tone jolts her out of her stupor, and she doesn’t have time to be surprised by the welling fire that suddenly burns inside her stomach. Out of everything today, opening her mouth is the easiest thing she’s done.

“And if it isn’t Logan Echolls, as tall as – wait, no. Is it just me or did you shrink? Don’t tell me you used to wear _lifts_ in high school!” She puts a hand to her mouth in mock horror.

Instead of volleying her hit, Logan pins her with a surprisingly genuine look. He shakes his head, bemused. “’Ronica Mars, what are you doing here? I’m not even going to ask how you knew I was here, let alone what room I was in. As much as I _don’t_ want to know, I’m pretty sure I already do.”

She laughs and it’s real. The question in his words, though, stifles the humor as quickly as it had flourished. “Is it that illegal to catch up with an old friend?”

Logan simply raises his eyebrows; at the word _illegal_ or _friend_ , she isn’t sure.

She looks away, down the hall. “I don’t suppose we can avoid rehashing the last time we saw each other?”

His brow furls, that patented Echolls spark igniting in his eyes. He taps his chin with his finger for a moment until an exaggerated _ah-ha_ expression blooms on his face. “ _Oh_ , you mean when I came to town for your dad’s funeral and you had Wallace drop off a plane ticket back to New York at my hotel room and then called me to say…oh, what was it…‘fuck off, go to hell, and never come back’?”

She averts her gaze.

He continues. “Technically, that’s not the last time we _saw_ each other. _Ooh!_ Are you referring to the time I beat up that guy at Hearst for you and then you _transferred universities_ to get away from me?”

She lets the silence hang in the air for a moment before smiling widely and clapping her hands. “Great, so we can avoid all that? Although, _technically_ , I never asked you to beat him up. But that’s okay, you know me. Let bygones be bygones.”

Logan dares to raise an unconvinced eyebrow but duly changes the topic. With the same striking vulnerability that captured her back in high school, he drops his gaze down to the floor and then lifts it back up to look her square in the eye. “I’m so sorry. About your dad.”

She gnaws at her lower lip, swallows, curses today for not being a Lamb or…well, for not being a Lamb day. In the end, she just dips her head. “What’re you doing back in Neptune?”

“Don’t worry, I’m not here to start another turf war with my old buddy Weevs or anything so nefarious. Just in town to clear up some estate paperwork.”

Veronica smiles to cover up the hunch of her shoulders at the mention of Weevil. “When it comes to an Echolls, even something as boring as estate paperwork is _nefarious_.”

Logan grins in return, that crooked one that she loves. He steps back. The door creaks as he opens it wider, and he gestures her in. Hesitantly, she manages one step, and then two, and then suddenly she’s far enough into the room to sink onto the edge of the pleather couch.

“So…” She’s not sure what he does now or who’s in his life. “…How are things?”

He closes the door and leans back against it. “Isn’t this the Veronica Mars that grills people for a living? No interrogation? Blackmail? Taser threats?”

“Well, if you’re really in need of a good old-fashioned threatening then I have –” Veronica digs around in her jean pocket for a moment before pulling out a paper clip. She frowns at it. “– a paper clip. No Taser, sorry.”

Logan laughs. It’s not his snide, half-chuckle that she remembers but a deep, mirthful laugh. His eyes dance. “I appreciate the offer. I knew something’s been missing since I got back, I didn’t realize just how integral a Mars’ threat is to my Neptune experience. Things are good, though. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m doing production management at New York Magazine. Hoping to make a lateral shift, maybe get to write a column.” He shrugs. “We’ll see. Nothing of the glamorous-Echolls variety.”

Veronica can’t help the smile that breaks across her lips. “You were always good – _excellent_ – with words. I’m sure you’ll get there.”

“And what of the infamous Ronnie? Still sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong?” He smirks, but not unkindly. He finally abandons the door and sits down on the other side of the couch.

She shakes her head. “No more private investigating for me. I’m on…eternal probation.” She huffs a short, mirthless laugh. “I’m working toward my law degree. Third year, so things are on their way.”

Logan’s eyebrows tip up. “I can’t imagine a Veronica who doesn’t chase down dirty criminals. I never thought you’d stop.”

A memory hovers of him trying to convince her to let the rape cases go their freshman year at Hearst. Veronica gnaws at the corner of her lip. “I got…” _Manic? Vengeful? Bloodthirsty?_ “…after what happened…with…well, I planted evidence. There wasn’t enough at the time for the charges to stick. No fingerprints, no recovered murder weapons, all that. Anyway, it…backfired. Ruined the prosecution. And now my dad’s killers are still walking around, free as anyone.” She shrugs like that thought doesn’t prowl her dreams. Her skin prickles, and she shivers against the wash of shame. “Learned my lesson. Hence, Wallace’s unfortunately titled ‘2008 Veroni-gate’ drove me pretty quickly through the gates of retirement.”

“I don’t know what to say…” Logan blows out a long breath and rubs at the back of his head. “Wallace _has_ always been damn good at naming things. How is he, these days?”

Veronica grabs at the topic change. “He’s good. Doing engineering work at a firm in Neptune. Don’t ask me what that entails, though. He tried to teach me about vectors once and he’s never mentioned his work in my vicinity again.”

Logan chuckles. “And what’s good ole Weevs doing?”

Her heart slaps against her ribcage. She’s fucked Weevil more times now than she and Logan ever had sex, and her head clouds at the thought. She shakes it to clear away the nebulous realization.

“He’s g – good,” she stutters. Her cheeks warm. “He was working as a, um, a car mechanic.”

Logan’s eyes narrow. He nods slowly. “That’s…good. Wait, was?”

“He, um, he left.” She shrugs. There’s a sharp pain below her ribs. He’s been gone two weeks now and she’s horrified to realize that she misses his belt against her skin more than she misses…her throat closes up. _Him_. Through the tightness in her throat, she manages to cough out: “How’s Mac?”

“You don’t know?” He tilts his head. “I get that she moved to New York and all, but I thought you two would keep in touch.”

She tangles her hands together in her lap and drags a blunt thumbnail down the center of her palm meditatively. She hasn’t spoken to Mac since… She sighs. She can’t tell him that Mac left their friendship after Weevil joined her cadre of Men She Meets for Sex. She doesn’t know if Mac abandoned her from disgust or confusion or a shorter fuse of Wallace’s same concern. The end result was the same for Veronica. “We fell out, I guess. Happens.”

“Hmmm.” Logan side eyes her speculatively. She’s all out of conversation fodder, and her gaze darts around the room, not landing at any one place. He sighs. “As nice as it is to _catch up_ , I know you have to be here for something more than just us exhausting our contact lists.”

She nods and then she keeps nodding. “Yeah, I don’t…I honestly don’t know why I came here.”

“Are you okay, Veronica?”

She’s not used to hearing her name plain from his lips: unaccompanied by her last name for emphasis – _Veronica Mars_ – or unembellished with nicknames for old time’s sake – _Ronnie_. Instead, just _Veronica_.

“Remember that time,” she laughs. She hunches over at the force of it. She starts speaking again even as she keeps laughing. “Remember that time your dad locked me in a freezer and set the porch around it on fire? Remember that?”

Logan flinches.

“I mean, of course you don’t remember, you weren’t there, you were busy getting the shit kicked out of you and being framed for murder. But I remember it.” A sudden band of pain around her head chisels away the hysterical edge to her voice. She drops her tone, quiets it, as the agony of the memory lengthens and deepens into something softer but more viscerally awful. She whispers. “I remember being in that freezer and feeling the press of heat at its seams. I remember knowing that I was going to die there. I remember the smoothness of the plastic indoor casing, and how different it felt from how I’d imagined my coffin might feel, and how little that mattered. I remember hoping it would be quick and knowing that it wouldn’t be.”

Logan’s short, sharp exhales puncture the air in between her words.

She lowers her voice even more, but she knows he can still hear what she says next. “That’s how I feel all the time. Like I’m in my tomb, waiting to die a quick death, even as I know it’s going to. Take. So. Long.”

Logan shakes his head, but the movement seems more absent: a general protest about the meaning behind her words as opposed to a matter-of-fact denial of their utterance.

“That time, my dad was there to save me. He was there,” the words catch on a sob. She chokes it back down. “But there’s no one there this time.”

She listens to Logan’s ragged breaths. She has to leave. She waits for her composure to return, but he speaks before she’s ready. “Because there really is no one, or because you won’t let anyone else be there?”

She yanks her gaze to him. He’s glowering furiously at her. She closes her eyes. “You already know the answer to that.”

A calloused grip ensnares her wrist.

“You don’t need _saving_ , Ronnie. We both know you’re not some damsel in distress. But you can admit when you need help.” He shakes her wrist when she tries to cut him off. “You’re capable of it. You _can_. You just _don’t_.”

He stands, pulling her wrist along with him and jerking her to her own feet. She stares at him, thoughts uncorralled.

“You’re Veronica fucking Mars,” he spits. “You’re the girl that can’t let a mystery go unsolved, that threatens men three times your size without batting an eyelash, that risked life and limb to get a rapist behind bars, so _come on_. You _can_. You can ask for help, so ask me. Ask me, Veronica, or ask somebody. Anybody. Just… _ask_.”

She shakes her head. “Logan, nothing’s okay. How can you help anything, anybody, _me_?”

“Just let me try.” His eyes press into her. “Let me try. But you have to ask.”

 _He can’t do anything for you_ , her mind whispers insidiously. She thinks about leather snapping against her flesh, and fingers clenching around her throat, and teeth pressing into her skin. Her ribs hurt, a rigid cage creaking around a balloon expanding, expanding, expanding in her chest. Her mind is dizzy with thoughts that don’t finish, anxieties with no outlet, and she clenches her eyes shut against the rioting. Her teeth grind together. She can feel her pulse everywhere: against the flesh of her wrist, inside her ears, quaking frantically below the curve of her jaw. The balloon keeps expanding, and then she says the words:

“Help me.”

The balloon deflates, and she can breathe, and her eyes sting.

Her legs give out beneath her and she falls, but he does as she asks and grabs her, holds her – helps her. She pushes her face into his shirt and sobs. She can barely hear herself speak over the crescendo of her pulse in her ears. “Help me.”

His nose presses into the side of her head and her hair grows damp. His voice is thick with tears. “Okay. Okay.”

He shifts so that his arms come up around her ribs, winding behind her back and pulling her closer. He smells like musk and ocean and a slight, leftover tang of Old Spice. And she suddenly knows that the Something inside of her is intangible, unreachable, for Leo, but only because it was already held impossibly, inexplicably by the man holding her.

His arms draw back from the embrace but before she can protest the loss, he’s picking her up to cradle her, like something precious, something worthwhile, against his chest. She tucks her head beneath his chin and exhales shaky sobs into the side of his neck.

“I’m sorry I sent you away. When you came here for his fu – the funeral – I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” The words tumble out of her.

“It’s okay, I know, I know. But you’re not alone, and you don’t have to be. I know, it’s okay.” He repeats like a mantra. She’s not sure why until she realizes she’s still pressing apologies into his skin.

He sets her down on his bed. He slides the sheets out from beneath her weight before tucking them over her, pulling them up just below her chin.

“Thank you,” she cries like a child, like she hasn’t since she _was_ a child and her dad was there to protect her from the monsters under her bed – the kind of imaginary monsters she used to fear before she learned about the real ones.

“Thank you,” he repeats her words back at her.

Dry lips touch her forehead. Her chest hurts. Through the small opening between the curtains, she makes out the barest winks of stars above the faint, orange brushes of dusk. Grief tugs at her eyelids. She sleeps.

  
  


She wakes. He’s a warm line beside her, not quite touching, but his heat emanates. She turns her head on the pillow to look at him. His jaw is slack, and his eyes are closed, eyelids twitching. She’s not sure what time it is but the column of sky visible through the curtains is still dark. She frees an arm from the tangle of blankets and brushes a hand along his shoulder. He releases a sleepy noise, a kind of disgruntled groan. She inches closer.

“Logan,” she breathes. There’s something that woke her, something that’s growing inside her. A frisson of heat up her spine and warmth pooling low in her stomach. Her voice is scratchy and hoarse from crying. “Logan.”

“Mmmm…Ronnie…what?” He shifts onto his side to face her, eyes still closed.

She nestles closer. She’s not sure how close she’s allowed or what’s okay. He said he would help her, but what does that mean?

“Logan.” Her eyes are wet. A fever riots beneath her skin. She nudges her nose against his and then pulls back to look at him.

His eyes squeeze tighter before blinking open. In the dimness of the room, his irises are dark, dark, dark. His words are thick with sleep. “What’s wrong?”

She shakes her head. “I want you. I want you but…do you want me? Is that okay?”

He closes his eyes and her heart stops. He opens them. “I always want you, ‘Ronica. Epic, remember?”

“Epic.” She breathes. She draws herself closer again. “Is it okay that…that I want you now? I only just saw you again after…after years. Is that okay?”

Anxiety churns at the base of her throat. She’s spent the past years taking and taking and taking. Her hands clench around the instinct. She forces them to relax.

 _I don’t want to take anymore_.

Logan tilts his head and touches his lips to hers in a shadow of a kiss. “Of course, that’s okay. Of course, it is.”

His hands slide beneath the sheets to grip her, and she goes with him easily when he pulls her against him. He slips a leg between hers. She doesn’t hum. He lays open-mouthed kisses like benedictions, and she’s briefly reminded of Leo trying to worship her with his tongue and lips. Logan draws his head back slightly. They breath together in the space between them. After a moment, she surges forward and kisses him, fiercely and helplessly. One of his hands travels down her clothed side. His fingers clasp at her belt loop and he rolls onto his back, tugging her with him. Her legs part around his hips. Logan moans into her mouth and she groans in reply. His hands skim up and down her sides. Veronica breaks the kiss and pushes herself up. His clever fingers follow her. Together, they bring her shirt up and over her head. Logan drops it on the grey bedspread.

The pads of his thumbs run along the edges of her bra, then drift up to skate over the puckering outline of her nipples. Veronica sighs. The muscles in his abdomen tense as he sits up. He winds his arms around her, and she exhales into his kiss. Logan works at her bra clasp. She sighs again into Logan’s mouth when her bra falls loose around her shoulders. Lips still moving against hers, Logan carefully draws one of her arms, and then the other, out of the bra straps. She feels his fingers skate over the corrugated scar left by the handcuff that last day with Leo, and she knows he must feel the irregularity of the tissue, but he doesn’t pause, just kisses her harder. Veronica slides her fingers down to begin easing up the fabric of his shirt. Logan leaves her mouth but only to kiss down the column of her neck. She tilts her chin and sinks into the sensation. Her fingers pause halfway up his torso. She rubs her thumbs at the line of his ribs.

“Is this okay? Tell me to stop, and I’ll stop,” Logan breathes into her collarbone.

She nods.

“I need to hear it.”

“Yes. Yes, Logan, this is okay, this is good, this is…yes.” Veronica leans back to finally get his shirt over his head. It drags his hair up with it, leaving a porcupine mess on his head. She stifles a laugh and wraps her hand behind his neck to draw him closer. Veronica kisses him.

Logan lays back down and she goes with him, pouring herself into his every crevice and hollow, molding herself against him until they’re one creature. They kiss languidly until she forgets that they ever had another destination in mind that wasn’t this. This is everything.

“Wait, wait,” he says, suddenly. He begins to edge out from beneath her. “Let me grab a condom.”

She stills him. “I’ve been tested. Recently. I’m negative. I promise.” She has the forms at home to prove it.

“But what about…y’know?” He frowns at her, features dim but discernable in the dark.

“I can’t.” She bites her lip. “I don’t mean I’m on the pill or anything. The…the chlamydia. From Beav – Cassidy. If left untreated it can, um, it can…Anyway, I can’t, so. No need to get up or grab anything.”

“Oh,” he breathes. His voice catches. “God, Veronica, I’m so –”

“Don’t be sorry. I don’t want kids anyway, so it’s okay. Come on, just, let’s move on. I want to move on, please.” She doesn’t wait for an answer, just presses her lips to his.

They eventually manage to kick off their pants, and slip out of their underwear, and then he helps brace her as she sinks down, down, down. He releases a long, guttural moan. His hands brush back and forth along her thighs. Veronica begins to rock with small, slight movements, and his hands stay soft at her knees even as the tendons in his neck grow taut.

She braces her clasped hands on his sternum, giving her the strange sense memory of applying chest compressions, and finally begins to thrust her hips up and down shallowly. Veronica looks down, and Logan’s staring at her. Into her. His eyes are liquid in the dark, so opaque she can almost make out her reflection in them through the sliver of moonlight that peers between the pulled curtains. _If your eyes were the only mirrors I saw myself in…_

Her legs begin to shake and just as she seats herself fully with a gusting exhale, he rolls them over.

“Okay?”

She nods, breathing shakily against his neck. “Yes. Yes. Okay.”

Logan withdraws from her, out, out, out, and pauses before slowly pressing back in, in, in. She throws her head back.

Veronica closes her eyes.

In and out, in and out. She feels like a wave caught in the mercurial push-and-pull of the moon’s tug. Logan leans all of his weight onto one elbow braced next to her head and his other hand disappears beneath the covers. He presses at her between their bodies. His touch is soft but certain, light and teasing but confident and purposeful. Veronica rolls her hips up, seeking more. There’s no ache, no burn, and she keens into his shoulder. With the blackness behind her eyelids, and the pulse of him inside her drawing in and forcing out each breath, and the tender brushes between their bodies, she feels like a perfect little chrysalis curled warmly in its perfect little cocoon. _Any second now_ , Veronica thinks. _Any second now, and I’ll be reborn_.

Logan’s touch turns firmer, driving her orgasm out of the past few months…years?... of forced hibernation. Veronica’s chin jerks up, chest tightening as it nears and nears. Her throat works around quiet, wordless sounds and she presses impossibly closer into his hand. Her legs spasm and the muscles in her stomach contract and release and contract, and she shakes her head against the sheer enormity of the sensation. Veronica blinks, and she realizes that her eyelashes are wet.

Logan nuzzles her nose with his. His fingers linger, petting loosely, and he slows the jerk of his hips. He whispers, “it’s okay, you’re okay. It’s going to be okay.”

“I’m fine, I’m alright,” she replies. She jolts her hips to bring him deeper inside. “Keep going.”

He listens, because he’s Logan. Logan always listens. She lets her eyes drift closed again. He pulls his hand back up, and damp, sticky fingers press at her jaw and along her neck. He dips his head to catch her mouth again with his. Veronica bites softly at his lower lip. Logan tastes like salt and something heavy but not unpleasant on her tongue – morning breath, even though it isn’t morning. Veronica hopes it tastes the same this tomorrow, when they’ll wake with the sun rising, and the day after, and the day after that.

A sudden realization makes her movements stutter. _I still love him_. And then, _he loves me_. Or he will, at least. Maybe not tomorrow, or the day after, but maybe the day after that. Eventually.

“Do you still feel like you’re in that freezer? It’s – it’s okay if you do,” he pants the words out against her chin. “It’s okay if you don’t feel like that now, but you do again later. Whatever, however…however you feel, it’s okay. I just want to know if you feel like that, right now.”

“I don’t.” And she means it.

She means it.

She means it.

 _She means it_.

She scrabbles to hold onto that feeling, fingers scrambling desperately, heart ratcheting in her ribcage, because even as she means it, she can see it vanishing. See it all vanishing.

She’s not a chrysalis. She’s out of seconds.

 _He’ll love me_ , she thinks. She squeezes her eyes tighter, tears pooling at the seam of her eyelids. She digs her fingernails into the flesh of his shoulder blades, but it doesn’t matter how hard she holds. It’s slipping out of her hands anyway. There’s no ache. There’s no burn. She cries. And then he finishes and rocks into her two, three, four times before sliding out. It all happens so quickly. She’s out of seconds. He noses at her cheek, her ear, the curve of her neck. He kisses her. He murmurs praises and thanks to nameless deities into her hair. He gets up with a last whisper of gratitude followed by the word _shower_ and then _join me soon?_ He walks to the bathroom. He doesn’t turn around. She thinks he would, if he knew.

She lies in the sweaty mess of the sheets for a moment, and then she gets out of the bed. The shower spray echoes off the tiles. She methodically pulls her clothes on. One arm through the sleeve. Other arm through the sleeve. Left foot into, and then through, the pant leg. Right foot into, and then through, the other pant leg. Zipper. Button. Belt. Socks, then shoes. She thinks, but only for the barest second. _He’ll love me_. She leaves.

 _If he loves me, he won’t hurt me_.

She doesn’t look back. She doesn’t look back.

She doesn’t look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for implied/referenced sexual assault, implied/referenced character death, implied/referenced self-harm, implied/referenced infertility, and sex. The 'r' word for sexual assault is used several times - I know this word is triggering for some people so be careful with yourself. And lastly, GO CHECK OUT [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric) 's wonderful new fanfic, "Good things come in threes."


	12. 0.2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for warnings.

23:45: _I’m so sorry, Wallace. You told me, you warned me. I swear, it wasn’t my intention, I swear._

  
  


23:47: _What’d you do?_

23:48: _Veronica, what’d you do?_

  
  


23:50: _I think you should go see Logan. I know you’re not friends, but he needs someone right now. You were right. You were right._

  
  


23:51: _Veronica…I can’t believe you._  
  
23:51: _Except I can, and that makes it so much worse._

  
  


23:51: _I’m sorry. Please._  
  
23:53: _Wallace?_  
  
23:54: _Do I still have you?_  
  
23:56: _Wallace?_  
  
23:56: _I’m stuck with you, remember…? You’re my barnacle._

  
  


23:57: _Just give me some time._

  
  


23:57: _Okay…_  
  
23:58: _Okay, how much time?_  
  
23:59: _Wallace?_

  
  


00:00:  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for...just general sadness. Much love to my beta, [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric).


	13. 1.2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Check end notes for warnings.

She remembers one afternoon with Weevil, when things were close to an end and she had no idea.

“Sometimes,” he’d exhaled. A long, silent moment had hung before his next words came. “The girl I’m fucking seems like she belongs more in a coffin than in a bed.”

She’d nodded.

“And I’m not talking about Lilly.”

  
  


She’s in the motel room. He shows up seventeen minutes after she’d called him. She uses the time to shower and doesn’t think about Him doing the same thing across town. Doesn’t think about Him walking out into the empty bedroom. She _doesn’t_.

He lets himself in without knocking. “You know this isn’t our usual day, right? You woke me up – I was having the best dream. Wanna know what it was about?”

“Shut up,” she says, emerging from the bathroom. Even after toweling dry, her body is damp from the trapped steam.

“It was about drowning kittens.” He stares at her. She doesn’t twitch. “Can’t even take a fucking joke, huh, Mars?”

“You were right,” she tells him. The cold air of the room is starting to pebble her nipples and draw gooseflesh across her bare skin. His eyes manage to stay on her face, and they narrow at her words. “You’re the best at it. So, I called you.”

He nods slowly. He begins shucking off his clothes, but he won’t stop flashing looks at her. She ignores him and walks to the bed until the edge of the mattress presses into her thighs. She folds herself over, presenting. There’s no black underwear for him to snap this time, but she shivers against the phantom sensation.

She shuffles her stance wider as recirculated air drifts against the backs of her thighs. His clothing rustles when he kicks it into a corner. He plants his feet to flank hers, and for a moment it’s the only place they touch. Warm hands palm at her hips and his calluses scrape against her skin. She lets herself smile, briefly, but it feels fake on her lips. The calluses are one of the main reasons she likes him for this. The other reason rings in her head. _I’m better at it than all the others because you can only hate yourself as much as you need to when you’re fucking me_.

She inhales deep, deep, deeply. She clasps her together hands on the thin motel comforter, elbows and forearms bracketing her head and bracing her weight. He’s breathing softly. He’s hesitating.

“Come on. Or are you all bark and no bite?” She growls. “Fuck me.”

He doesn’t make her wait any longer. A burning pressure and she exhales. He eases inside. She hums.

He’s not the biggest she’s had. Not bigger than what she just had tonight. Still, her walls mold to him. He groans and his hands tighten around her hipbones. She’s glad he doesn’t try to grip her breasts. His fingers lack the finesse of a man who’s learned in the ways of pleasing women. His fingers lack the finesse of…she pushes herself backward against his next thrust.

Her toes scrape at the stubby carpet.

The pressure of him inside jostles something loose in her chest the way it always does, the way it only does when she’s here, with him, _only him_ , now. She sighs in relief.

She keeps her eyes open even though they burn. The colors of the bedspread blur, but only because they’re out of focus. She won’t cry again. She wishes she hadn’t forgotten to turn on the television tonight to let its buzz drown out the sounds. She hasn’t forgotten in a long, long while.

His fingers don’t leave her hips, and he doesn’t try to touch her between her legs. She needs the burn, the ache.

He pants harder, and pounds harder, and everything feels easier. Finally, he buries himself and moans. He releases deep inside her.

She breaths. She gives him several minutes on top of her before she shuffles. He slides off onto the bed and lays on his back, not looking at her.

“I haven’t gotten new forms from you in weeks. Your other boys not getting tested anymore?” He asks. She pushes off the bed and walks across the room. She grabs his form out of his pocket, the name and identifying information not yet blacked out. She normally does that at home herself. All of the tests in the panel are negative. She rips the form in half, then into quarters, then into small pieces that litter the floor.

“There are no other boys. Now go shower,” she orders. She picks her way over the scraps to sit back down on the bed.

He stands, and she feels him staring down at her. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

She waits until he’s standing in the bathroom doorway. She shifts absently and leans into the ache that spreads across her hip when she does. If she looked down, she knows she’d see the purple crest of a bruise arching across her hipbone.

When she finally speaks, Lamb doesn’t turn to look at her.

“This is all I want. This is all.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for implied/referenced character death and sex. When I started this I thought I'd be finished with it MUCH SOONER than I was, but finally around academics, my research, my ghostwriting project, and MCAT studying...here it is. That's a wrap. Lastly, just the biggest, warmest, most heartfelt thanks for my brilliant, amazing, incredible beta, [Literallymetaphoric](https://archiveofourown.org/users/literallymetaphoric). I wouldn't be anywhere without you. SERIOUSLY, go check out her work!


End file.
